• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, May 19, 2014

Michael Brenner, vice president marketing and content strategy at SAP offered some sage advice to make the natives restful during his opening keynote at OMMA Native: Be the ball. Okay, so he didn’t actually quote the memorable line invoked by Ty Webb, the character played by Chevy Chase in “Caddy Shack.” But he did quote another well-worn line that’s pretty close: “We need to be what people are interested in, instead of interrupting what people are interested in.”

He used the line to set-up the logic of shifting toward a content marketing strategy and adopting native advertising formats to, well, stop interrupting.

He then used some not-so-big-data to back that logic up, including some shocking stats on why old school advertising just doesn’t work anymore -- or at least not very well. One of those stats was attributed to Nielsen that the average consumer is now exposed to 5,000 marketing messages per day.

Need a few more bullet points? How about these: 72% of the U.S. population is on the Do Not Call List; 86% of people skip TV ads?

But if you really like mind-blowing numbers, here’s the killer one: The average consumer’s attention span is now about eight seconds, which is down from 12 seconds in 2000.

Given the implications of that stat, let me repeat it for those of you how may not have been focused on it: The average consumer’s attention span is now about eight seconds, which is down from 12 seconds in 2000.

Want to put that time frame into a human perspective? Brenner used a goldfish to do just that, noting that the average attention of a goldfish is about nine seconds.

What are the implications of those numbers? Well, for one thing, it means consumers no longer live in a fishbowl. They are the fishbowl.